A U.S. citizen who was violently arrested in a California ICE raid and detained for 24 hours said it was all worth it if an undocumented person was able to use that moment to flee.
Job Garcia, a 37-year-old PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, was arrested during an ICE raid last Thursday at a Home Depot in Hollywood, ABC 7 reported.
Video captured an ICE agent telling Garcia, who is a U.S. citizen, “You want to go to jail? Fine, you got it.”
Garcia recalled the horrifying moment he was placed into custody by the officer: “The pressure of like, the knee on my back, and his hand on my neck, I thought like ‘Is this it for me?’”
Footage of the violent arrest, which came as ICE agents detained about 30 people at the store, quickly went viral.
Before he was detained, Garcia and several other shoppers were yelling at the officers as they targeted a man in a truck by smashing his window.
“A split second after that is when he lunged at me. I was still recording, so he pushes me, puts both hands on me, and I pushed his hand off. And then, he didn’t like that, so he grabbed my left hand,” Garcia said.
Garcia said the officers seemed surprised when he told them he was a U.S. citizen, but they still decided to arrest him. He was first taken to a holding area at Dodger Stadium, where he overheard agents discussing how many people they’d grabbed.
“Like, ‘How many bodies did you guys get today?’ And one of them said 31, and they started like, ‘Yay! It was a good day today.’ And they were like, high-fiving each other,” Garcia said.
Garcia said he also overheard officers talking about potential charges they could slap him with.
“At first it was assault of a federal agent, but only later, the narrative started switching because the video was out,” Garcia said.
Some 24 hours later, Garcia was finally released. Despite the circumstances, he told ABC 7 it would have been well worth it if it gave undocumented migrants a window of opportunity to flee and find their families.
“However long period that was, if an undocumented person ran away and got away and got to get to his family, and got to get to his pregnant wife, then I’m OK with that,” he said.
It was not immediately clear whether Garcia would be charged with any crime, although he told ABC 7 he plans to take legal action for the violation of his civil rights.
Anti-ICE demonstrations have spread across the U.S. after taking off in California earlier this month following raids of workplaces.
The number of people without a criminal record being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and held in detention has jumped 800 percent since January, as officials face pressure to boost numbers, according to reports.
This uptick has resulted in 51,302 people being imprisoned in ICE centers as of the start of June, marking the first time that detention centers held over 50,000 immigrants at once.
Less than a third of those detained are convicted criminals, with the remainder pending criminal charges or arrested for non-criminal immigration offenses, such as overstaying a visa or unauthorized entry to the country.
The latest data is from June 1, published by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Since January, when the Trump administration entered office, ICE has not published clear and official figures on arrests or deportations.
